Dolly Parton has always been a beacon for women’s voices in music as well as the wider world. But given where we are now, it’s easy to forget what exactly she had to fight through in order to prevail as the Queen of Country.
That’s why, despite having some 3,000 songs in her locker, it’s not as if Parton is going to pick out the big hits as being her everlasting favourites. Given the depths that her life has often sunk to and the struggles she has had to overcome, her closest connection to a song is going to come in something that she poured her heart and soul into; something that she cherished and considered almost like her own child.
Geese covering The Velvet Underground’s ‘Waiting for My Man’
The trouble was, in a social landscape as comparatively stark as the 1970s, in juxtaposition to now, creating a song which bore the real truth of women’s lives was a far more insurmountable challenge than it should have been. Take a song like ‘Down from Dover’ as the prime example, released on Parton’s 1970 album The Fairest of Them All – the irony was, it was dealt possibly one of the most unfair deals imaginable.
It simply goes to show how much women’s narratives were eschewed and dismissed at the time, however, given that the heartbreaking story of ‘Down from Dover’ was never given the time of day. Telling the tale of an unwed mother who was ousted from her family and eventually gives birth to a stillborn child, you would think this would be a song to stop the world in its tracks. Instead, very few people heard it because it was never allowed on the radio.
The mark of Parton was that she never seemed bitter or defined by this, but determined to prove her mentor, Porter Wagoner, wrong when he said that a song like that would never get commercial airplay. Unfortunately, on this occasion, he was right – but the country queen knew that one day the world would change for the better, and it certainly did.
“Back at the time when I put it out on a record, they wouldn’t play it on the radio,” she later recalled. “Lord, now you can have a baby right on television. It’s all different. I really love some of my songs like that, that tell stories.”
Parton has a mantra in life for always breaking down barriers for things once never thought possible. ‘Down from Dover’ was just one of a myriad of examples of that, because rarely has such a powerful female narrative ever been attempted on the world stage of music. It’s even more amazing to know that she tried it all the way back in 1970. Of course, the reaction back then was far from overwhelmingly supportive, but now it simply acts as a marker of how far we have come.
Out of all of Parton’s songs, that represents something of far greater significance than any mainstream hit, because it’s something that comes from the heart and also attempts to platform the stories of people who may otherwise feel silenced in the world. It was high time that society caught up to that message when they refused to play ‘Down from Dover’ on the radio, but it was never going to put the queen off her sights. Indeed, if anything, it would have only made her more determined.
